Analysis #2: Russian Formalism & Defamiliarization

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself

When the poet Philip Larkin wrote his famous lines they fucked you up in his 1971 poem entitled “This be the verse” it sent a shock wave across the nerves of parents everywhere, and challenged young adults and teens to see their parents in a new light. According to Julia Rivkan’s introduction on Art as Technique, “[Russian Formalist] were concerned with writing that would be brutally honest and shockingly new, these writers rejected traditional culture and traditional artistic forms that had for them become boring and overly conventional” (15).

What made Larkin’s poem so shocking in the 1971, as well as today, is the incorporation of the technique called defamiliarization. In Larkin’s poem he uses the common and familiar word “fuck” and defamiliarizes it by referencing it to ones parents. Unlike poem in past history that often praised the virtues of parents and obedience, Larkin goes against the grain by resisting the traditional prose in poetry (i.e roughened up language) and instead uses everyday slang in his verses.

Larkin is similar to Tolstoy who, “Described the [religious] dogmas and rituals he attacked as if they were unfamiliar, substituting everyday meaning for the customary religious meaning of the words common in church ritual. Many persons were painfully wounded; they considered it blasphemy to present as strange and monstrous what they accepted as sacred” (Rivkan 18). Many readers both today and well in the 70s found Larkin’s use of everyday vulgar language highly offensive.

However, Larkin’s goal in his poem is to challenge his readers, especially his young readers, to reject the socially habitual way they have always viewed their parents and Grandparents. Rivkin says, “the general law of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual it becomes automatic” (15).
Television shows in the 1950s like Leave It To Beaver, portrayed parents as perfect, all-knowing, all-wise, and without any faults. It became habitual for adults and children living in the 50s to watch perfect families like the Cleaver’s until they were overly familiarized by the images on screen.

Larkin defamiliarized the notion of the ideal perfect parents by telling his reader that all parents have faults that are passed down from generation to generation. Ironically, Larkin calls on his young reader to have some sympathy for their parents. They may not mean to, but they do… But they were fucked up in their turn. By fools in old-style hats and coats, who half the time were soppy-stern and half at one another's throats.
Larkin’s poem succeeds in shocking his reader as well as disrupting the habitual ways of seeing and thinking.

Works Cited

Shklovshy, Viktor. “Art as Technique”. Rivkin, Julie. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell publishing; United Kingdom, 2004.

Larken, Philip. “This Be the Verse”. Black, Joseph. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Broadview press; Canada, 2007.